With advances in continuous internet access and expanded broadband service there is a growing awareness of security issues, as evidenced recently by the commercialization and widespread sale of video communications equipment for remote monitoring of homes and offices. By utilizing these types of existing video communications equipment, it is possible to construct security systems for observing intrusions by suspicious persons and monitoring the weak, such as the sick, the aged, and children, from a remote location.
However, with a security system like that described above, it is necessary for the user at the remote location to check the video data periodically, and thus it is difficult to respond quickly when a problem arises. Accordingly, although there is also a security system having the ability to detect and report live objects like the system proposed, for example, by Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2002-74566, such a system provides no more than the ability to detect and report the intrusion by a person who might be a suspicious person.
In addition, with a security system like that described above, due to privacy concerns arising from the indiscriminate distribution of video data, the situations to which such a system can be adapted are limited. In order to solve such problems, a specialized system has been proposed that does not distribute the video itself but instead recognizes situations specified by the user and performs appropriate processing depending on the situation.
For example, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2002-352354, a system that recognizes and reports an emergency situation of a person under care, based on information such as response by audio or detection of absence by image recognition, is proposed. In addition, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 10-151086, a system that recognizes the situation inside the bathroom of the user from video data and issues a warning when an emergency is detected is proposed.
However, all these systems are constructed as specialized systems for certain unique situations, and are not a single device capable of being adapted to a variety of situations. Therefore, for example, when attempting to construct a security system adapted to a plurality of objectives, it is necessary to assemble a plurality of specialized devices for handling each and every situation, which increases the size and the cost of the system. Furthermore, these specialized systems are difficult to introduce (requiring construction and the like) and are not easy to install and use. In addition, the composition of a family and the situations of its members change over time, making these types of systems impractical.
By contrast, with recent advances in image processing technology and calculating power, a great many devices have been proposed that recognize ordinary human movements and situations. For example, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 6-251159, a device that converts feature vector sequences obtained from time series images into symbol sequences and selects the most plausible from among the object of recognition categories based on a hidden Markov model. In addition, many techniques for recognizing facial expression have been proposed, such as the device proposed by Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 11-214316 that recognizes such expressions as pain, excitement and so forth.
However, in attempting to achieve an ordinary movement/situation recognition device (that is, the capacity to recognize a variety of situations using a single device) using these types of techniques, the number of mistaken recognitions increases as the categories of movement that are the object of recognition increase, leading to a further increase in the required processing power.
Furthermore, because these conventional security systems report the same generalized emergency target to a predetermined reporting destination (such as a security firm) whenever any sort of emergency arises, it is difficult to use the device for multiple purposes. For example, in the case of a security system designed to monitor a child, it is preferable that the situation of the child be reported to the mother. Similarly, in the case of a security system designed to monitor emergencies such as the intrusion of a suspicious person or the outbreak of a fire, it is preferable that the emergency be reported to the security firm or the like quickly. However, it has been difficult to get conventional security systems to operate flexibly according to this sort of wide variety of purposes.